How much conductive yarn does an RF-shielding fabric need, and how fast does breakage ruin it?
research/garment-optics
RF-shielding weave model: 54–87 dB sheet shielding but the aperture bound caps it (36 dB at 2.4 GHz for 1 mm pitch, ~15 dB at 28 GHz); yarn breakage tracks 1/(1−2f) and conduction fails near 50% broken. Stylised; plane wave, ideal crossings, RF part only.
What it found
A thin-sheet shielding model of a conductive square weave (sheet resistance, aperture bound, metal mass) plus a Monte Carlo of random yarn breakage. Every design tried has a sheet shielding of 54–87 dB, but the aperture bound limits it: 36 dB at 2.4 GHz for a 1 mm pitch, about 15 dB at 28 GHz. Breakage raises resistance as the effective-medium estimate 1/(1−2f) up to 30% broken segments and the weave stops conducting near 50% (bond percolation). Stylised: plane wave, ideal crossings, recalled constants, no measurement; covers only the RF part of the optics milestone.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Engineered clothing
- Does contact resistance at yarn crossings matter for an RF-shielding fabric?Contact resistance at yarn crossings in the RF-shielding weave: no effect on an intact fabric, but with 20% of yarns broken a contact equal to one segment raises sheet resistance 22% and ten segments 2.3×. Stylised; contact values are a sweep, not measured.
- Does it matter where an RF-shielding fabric is damaged, and whether worn contacts go with the breaks?Correlated damage in the RF-shielding weave: worn contacts next to breaks (rc×10) raise the median sheet resistance at 20% broken from 2.05 to 3.03 segments; a fold band across the current direction at the same mean breakage leaves 57 of 60 draws open, while a fold along it helps. Stylised; wear multiplier is a sweep, not measured.
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- Can an optimiser cut the angle shift of a structural-colour coating, and what does it give up?Optimising 8-layer thin-film stacks for low angle shift at fixed colour: Nelder–Mead restarts cut mean ΔE76 shift from 12.4 to 1.4 (red) and 25.9 to 5.6 (blue) at 3000 evaluations, beating random search and differential evolution, at the cost of chroma and ~1.8–2.5× oxide mass. Stylised; flat substrate, no tolerance.
- Does an angle-stable structural-colour stack survive layer-thickness error?Thickness-error robustness of the
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garment-stackrobust: a CVaR (worst-quarter) training objective and a correlated rate-drift error model do not rescue the optimised angle-stable stacks; none beats the quarter-wave stack (red, iid error: mean J 14.1 vs best optimised 16.5). CVaR trims Nelder-Mead's 90th-percentile cost (47.1 to 43.1) at the price of the mean. Stylised; no coating measured.
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.